I guess they are right: you can’t trust Fox News.
Tuning in for literally minutes this morning, I saw Fox News this morning run the video of the Cleveland Ind…sorry, Guardians stunning the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series with an extra innings walk-off home run after tying the game with another homer in the 9th, as the Yankees were one out away from victory. Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino then spent an unusually long time expressing their enthusiasm for baseball and the play-of while making it crystal clear that neither of them knew what the hell they were talking about.
They said—twice!—that Cleveland was one strike away from elimination before that 9th inning home run. Morons. A Yankee win would have given New York a daunting 3 games to 0 lead (though the Yankees lost after having exactly that lead over the 2004 Boston Red Sox in that seasons’ famous ALCS), but the ALCS is a best-of-seven series, not best-of-five.
It’s disrespectful of baseball fans and the sport itself to presume to report baseball news and report it so carelessly and ignorantly. Perino and Hemmer obviously didn’t care enough to do their homework and to acquire sufficient basic knowledge about the play-offs to talk about the play-offs. Their feigned excitement was as fake as their commentary was incompetent. They are supposed to be professionals. A reporter thinking the ALCS is only five games while reporting on baseball’s play-offs is like thinking the popular vote determines the winner while reporting on a Presidential election.
Is a network that is this sloppy and unprofessional covering baseball likely to be more reliable when it reports on other matters?
Nope.
Ethics Alarms 
But they’re so damned cute!
This sort of sloppiness, or flat-out ignorance, is sadly just about universal in the news business. I see it every time there’s another news story about “a bedroom community 20 miles East of downtown Chicago”, or a crime involving a “.9mm handgun”. It’s the reason Michael Crichton developed the idea of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Just as a communist is somebody who has nothing, and wants to share it with the world, a journalist is somebody who understands nothing, and wants to tell everyone about it.
While I understand your point on this, I am not sure that blathering on about baseball (or whatever the sport du jour) has that much relationship to one’s ability to report on other things.
On the other hand, when I see Megyn Kelly talk about sports, she typically makes it clear up front that she really has no clue about whatever sport she’s talking about. She talks about it because something there has intersected with her real interests (these days, typically, it is biological men playing women’s sports).
So, I reckon I could put up with some chitchat about baseball if they will make sure we know that they know…..nothing about it.
It’s reporting. The subject shouldn’t matter. This wasn’t chit-chat, this was a report. Video, the works. And they misreported what was going on. (And baseball matters.)
And speaking of the playoffs, I’ve been watching and listening to the games. I have to admit that I am disappointed in the advertisements.
MLB.com seems to have maybe 4 or 5 ads that they just keep running over and over and over again. Almost half of them, I’d say, are TV series promos and at this point it doesn’t seem to matter what feed I am watching or listening to.
You’d think when we’re at the LCS level, they could do better.
Jack, if you wasted as much time as I do watching Hemmer/Perino, you may have been aware of a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that Perino is especially ignorant of all things sports. The segment is typically preceded by a banner reading “Dana Reads Sports.”
Hemmer is cast as the one who knows a thing or two sports, but it’s a regular trolling of Perino’s ignorance.
I’ve found it to be unamusing and believe sports coverage should be handled by a dedicated sports person, and that it shouldn’t be featured at all on a national news network during a news program.
Agreed. But Hemmer didn’t know the ALCS was a 7 game series either.